Through a series of crude calculations, Molczan figured out the duration of a single orbit and the number of degrees Earth would rotate during that period. Guessing the longitude of the previous night's pass, he forecasted that the satellite would traverse the sky just east of Hamilton about 15 minutes after sunset that evening. At that exact time, Ted Molczan stepped outside and looked up. There it was, blazing high in the southeast. A satellite observer was born.

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US spy satellites photograph targets on the ground, intercept communications, and search for signs of nuclear testing. In the 1960s, Corona satellite images convinced US officials that they had overestimated Russia's progress in the arms race. During the current conflict in Iraq, US satellites have been making hourly sweeps over the region. Traditionally, spy-in-the-sky operations are cloaked in secrecy: Though the US has spent some $200 billion on intelligence satellites during the past four decades, the government didn't even acknowledge the NRO's existence until 1992.

If denying the existence of a major intelligence bureaucracy with thousands of employees commuting each day to an office park near Dulles International Airport seems like a losing proposition, a similar set of challenges besets the NRO's efforts to keep the satellites themselves obscure. For starters, there's the matter of putting them into orbit: The launch of an Atlas rocket or space shuttle from the customary sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base or Kennedy Space Center is a spectacular event, visible for miles around. Details of many of these launches are published well in advance by Aviation Week - or Av Leak, as it's known to the hobbyists.

Furthermore, the average spy satellite is the size of a school bus and blanketed in Mylar or some other shiny thermal material that regulates its temperature. Once in space, it tends to reflect sunlight. "The problem is, space is transparent," says Jeffrey Lewis, a research fellow at the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies. "There's no way around that."

Depending on its size, construction, and orbit, a satellite can reflect enough light to make it visible to the unassisted eye. Thus, even as the NRO launched black satellites hoping that Russian radar observation stations would not detect them, those same satellites were occasionally spotted by kids like Ted Molczan, or anyone else who happened to look up at the night sky.

For America, having others know the precise time its eyes will be overhead poses a huge strategic problem. India's nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert in 1998 caught US intelligence unawares because the Indians had ascertained the orbits of US satellites and hid their operations accordingly. In Afghan caves abandoned by al Qaeda, US forces recovered documents detailing the passage of spy satellites. In 1978, a young CIA employee named William Kampiles sold the Soviets a technical manual describing the design and operation of KH-11s - the satellite whose orbital information Molczan's mystery caller sought. Kampiles was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

When Molczan was recovering his first satellite, he had little idea that, an ocean away, a fledgling group of professional and amateur observers in the UK was already monitoring the increasingly busy thoroughfares of space. One of them was British observer Russell Eberst, who worked in the satellite tracking section of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Thirteen years older than Molczan, he has recorded more data on secret satellites than any other tracker alive.

Once the skies got crowded and the satellites began to cross one another's paths, the US started publishing the orbits of most of its military and intelligence satellites. Eberst and his colleagues monitored those and others for scientific research, trying to evaluate the densities of the upper atmosphere and to refine their understanding of Earth's shape and gravitational field. But in 1983, the US changed the rules.

That June, the Reagan administration stopped revealing most of these orbits, hoping, unsuccessfully it turned out, to hide them from the Soviets. But the decision had a conspicuous unintended consequence: It "unwittingly set a challenge to the amateur network of observers," Eberst says, "to see if they could maintain reliable orbits for these 'secret' objects."

Molczan insists that the hobbyists are driven not by politics but by the technical challenges of observing something hidden. "I respect the right of anyone not to publish the orbital elements for their satellites," he says. "But they have to respect my right to try to figure out what those elements are."

Not long after the US started covering up much of its space-based espionage program, Molczan got in touch with the UK observers; meanwhile, the British government continued a steady shutdown of its satellite prediction service. This left an international fraternity of highly skilled satellite trackers with time on their hands itching to find out what had just been hidden. And with the advent of Internet bulletin boards, far-flung observers could swap notes and post their observations in real time. The game was afoot.

On February 28, 1990, NASA launched the space shuttle Atlantis from Kennedy Space Center, with a top-secret payload known as USA 53. Aviation Week reported the launch, and a posse of amateur observers set out to try to glimpse it, spotting the shuttle and its satellite cargo on each of its final three days in orbit. In Scotland, Russell Eberst saw it, as did a group of observers recruited by Molczan to watch from Alaska and Canada's Yukon and Northwest territories. Aviation Week said that the payload was a large digital-imaging reconnaissance satellite; the observers assumed it was similar to a Keyhole. But when they spotted the satellite itself, they noted that it was unusually bright, giving them their first hint that they were onto something very special.

On March 16, Soviet media reported an explosion associated with USA 53 and said that pieces of debris had been detected in orbit. On several mornings following this news, Molczan stood for hours on the roof of his high-rise, scanning the horizon for the satellite. "I froze my butt off," he recalls. "But I didn't see it."